Texas House lawmakers to evaluate STAAR's first year

AUSTIN, Texas — Top education leaders in the Texas House are to hear testimony on the state’s new standardized test and its effects on students, teachers, instruction practices and graduation rates.

Members of the House Public Education Committee will evaluate the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, today.

Official figures released this month indicate that if the final standards being implemented gradually were already in place, more than half of Texas high school freshmen would have failed in five key areas.

When ninth-graders’ scores were judged against final standards coming in 2016, the biology passing rate was 41 percent, and 39 percent for algebra.

In English, it would have been 34 percent for writing and 46 percent for reading. In world geography, it would have been 40 percent.

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"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Jonathan Swift "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Groucho Marx

Excerpt: "Clay Robinson is a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association. His group will spend its time before lawmakers focusing not on the performance of the new test, but on how the state’s testing system should be revamped."

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that educational laws and requirements are seldom decided by educators, nor are the decisions made based on educational research.

I think most would agree that accountability is important in education. However, I think few educators would support a set of standardized tests as the prime or only measure of accountability.

Quite a few students who work hard, and are successful in learning what they need to know, who don't test well for a variety of reasons.

Like IQ tests, other standardized tests are useful in very limited ways, and like IQ tests, other standardized tests are misused in areas where they are not very useful predictive instruments.

I know a number of students who did very well on all the standardized tests, but didn't learn what they needed to know to be successful in college, at a job, or in Life in general.

This is coming from an educator of young people who did not do well on standardized tests, but did well at jobs, from a person who does well on standardized tests, and from a person whose children have done very well on standardized tests,

Edited to add: If we need to know how a particular student or group of students are doing in class, mass standardized testing is not the answer. Instead, ask the teacher who sees the student/students every day and is most familiar with his/her/their level of learning. The answer you get that way will have the advantage of meaning something in the real world.

State accountability exams are unfortunately necessary in Texas due to the state's sordid history of grade inflation, social promotion, and falsifying of graduation rates and other statistics. This is an indictment, of course, of cynical school administrators, not teachers. Teachers are told they must pass a certain percentage of students in their courses (I was told 80%; 20% deserved to pass). High school graduates at some districts, even valedictorians, were found to be illiterate and subliterate when they entered colleges, much to the surprise of both the students and their parents. I blame state public officials for this incompetence and cynicism.

The STAAR end-of-course exams are much better than the TAKS exams which often tested course content a year or more after a student had taken a course in which they had received instruction. This was unfair to both students and teachers. STAAR passing scores are being increased gradually, which is appropriate so students and teachers have time to familiarize themselves with the new tests' difficulty. The news article that Jeff Ross cites says quite clearly that the STAAR end-of-course exams will eventually also count for 15 percent of each student's final grade, which is equally appropriate (quizzes, labs, written reports, and notebooks can be used for the remaining 85% of the final grade). Since the STAAR exams will test for precisely what students are taught in their classes, and can be used as a final exam, what's the problem?

The problem is that Texas students academically underachieve due to several circumstances. The first is that teachers do not have control of their classrooms; their time, specific teaching methods, and student discipline are all under the thumb of craven administrators who only want to keep parents happy and self-satisfied about the education of their children. Second, teachers are underpaid, of course, but even worse is that class sizes are too large; Texas needs tens of thousands more teachers to obtain better instruction and higher achievement. Third, there is a lack of student secular moral and motivational instruction (pervasive in European and Asian classrooms), in which positive reinforcement along with student socialization in early grades gives students the behaviors (self-discipline, internal motivation to achieve, and love of learning) to academically succeed. Finally, the main problem: Texas Republican state government is deliberately under-funding and sabotaging the state's public education system to damage it in favor of privatized education: charter schools, virtual schools, publicly-funded home schools, and ultimately vouchers for private religious schools, all of which are demonstrably no better and usually inferior to public schools. The main goal of their parade of state tests is not to document school accountability, but rather school failure so that school districts can be taken over and private and religious school vouchers implemented. Because of a Supreme Court decision, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2002, private vouchers are legal under this specific circumstance, circumventing even the Texas Constitution's explicit prohibition of state public funds being used for sectarian purposes.

So, until these various problems are solved, public school funding restored, and the radical Republican agenda to destroy the Texas public education system repudiated, increased accountability testing should unfortunately be looked at with suspicion.

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Jonathan Swift "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Groucho Marx

I started teaching 25 years ago, and figured out the GOP War on Public Education after about 3 years or so when the state GOP governor declared it to be "The Year of the Child" while cutting public education, and public services for poor children.

I'm still seeking the child who had a year devoted to them. I hope the child survived all the cuts to education and programs geared to benefit her/him.

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Jonathan Swift "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Groucho Marx

Thank you, jeffross. MAS, ask yourself why--with an exploding student population, greater need for higher student academic achievement in a global technological society, and more demands on teachers to prepare students for the future--our Republican state legislators and public education officials are radically increasing the number of charter schools paid for with public money, allowing virtual home schools paid for with public money to proliferate, massively cutting funding for public schools despite the availability of billions of dollars in rainy day funds, Texas-based corporations that make hundreds of billions of dollars in profit every year but are being under-taxed by the state, laying off tens of thousands of teachers, increasing the numbers of students in every classroom that reduces teacher effectiveness, forcing municipalities to raise property taxes if they want to keep their schools operating at the same level as before, and insisting on a greatly expanded state testing program with a new and more difficult exams and gradually increasing score percentages to pass. This is a Republican war on public education to go along with their wars on women, gays, poor and minority Democratic voters, and citizens with no or poor health insurance.

It may only be a drop in the bucket towards an unquenchable thirst, but the 10K a month we pay out toward Perry's digs plus the 3 million plus we paid out for security for Perry's failed run for President are a pretty good indication of where Texas' Republican Empire puts its priorities.

In the 50's I recall having to take achievement tests from time to time. As a student I always enjoyed the break we got from the classroom norm.

I really don't know where they came from or if they were even looked at the state level. My impression was the purpose was to show parents how their child was performing in school. And probably it was useful to the teachers in being able to recognize which students needed more attention.

The current system forces teachers to prepare for whatever state mandated test will be given from day one, rather than having to teach the material the way they believe it should be taught. The objective seems to be the production of binary robots who are clueless when the symbol "2" appears,